Buyers Wonder, Will Art Appreciate Over Time?

NEW YORK — The feverish debate goes on about contemporary art, causing considerable angst among its many new fans. How safe a haven is it for those in search of tangible assets for their liquidities?

Some conscientiously do their homework. Scrutinizing price lists and comparing them with the catalog reproductions of major auctions, they try to sound out the hearts and minds of recent buyers. The task was as delicate in the New York autumn sales as in London earlier this month.

Take the contemporary evening session at Sotheby’s New York on Nov. 9. That day the masterpiece, or so you were led to infer from its reproduction on the catalog cover, was a simplified image of a Coca-Cola bottle painted in black on white. The title, “Coca-Cola [4] (Large Coca-Cola),” gave a discreet hint that this really was art, not just any old Coca-Cola bottle.

If some briefly wondered whether the picture might be a poster, to which it bore an uncanny resemblance, Andy Warhol’s signature and a date, 1962, indicated otherwise. And if they were still unsure that this was a work of art, potential buyers needed only to glance at the long list of museum exhibitions in which the Coca-Cola bottle image had appeared.

Moments later, another image signed by Roy Lichtenstein in the same year came up. To outsiders who are not into contemporary art, “Ice Cream Soda” is just another picture in the poster-style category. A tumbler with frothy ice cream spilling over is painted in blue and white in the same simplified manner.

Here too, a long list of museum exhibitions vouched for its artistic character. Yet, intriguingly enough, the Lichtenstein did not cause the same excitement. It sold for $14.08 million after only two bidders chimed in. The contrast neatly summed up the difficulty of anticipating the performance of contemporary art.

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‘‘Skulls Rock’’ by Takashi Murakami.Credit
Sotheby’s

The day after, in Christie’s larger and highly successful evening sale, which netted $272 million, against $222 million at Sotheby’s, the roles of the two Pop artists were reversed. Warhol’s “Big Campbell’s Soup Can Opener (Vegetable)” painted in casein and graphite on linen, also in 1962, fetched $24 million, presumably disappointing the consignor and Christie’s, whose experts expected bidding to go perhaps as high as $50 million. But Lichtenstein triumphed with “Ohhh ... Alright,” a large close-up picture of a woman’s face painted in 1964. It rose to a world record $46.64 million.

Worryingly for investors, the difficulty of analyzing the criteria of success extends to the whole span of contemporary art. One reason is that it is often impossible to define the style of the artist. Consider Jeff Koons.

In November, Sotheby’s had chosen to represent the 56-year-old artist’s oeuvre with two vacuum cleaners neatly encased in transparent Plexiglas, one stacked above the other. A title, “New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon, New Shelton Wet/Dry 5 Gallon, Double Decker,” warned you that this was a work of art, not just household implements. He supplied a certificate of authenticity duly signed, because it was essential to differentiate the “New Shelton Wets” selected by him from ordinary New Shelton Wets available in shops. Apparently the artist mulled over this delicate piece of work for years, judging from the catalog, which says that it was “executed in 1981-1987.” Although reassured about the artistic validity of the encased vacuum-cleaners, bidders were moderately enthusiastic. They matched only the lower end of the estimate with a trifling $3.44 million.

On Nov. 10 at Christie’s, they again refused to pay much more than the low estimate for two Koonses. “Balloon Flower (Blue),” a monumental cluster of high chromium stainless steel balloons painted a translucent blue, made $16.88 million. Did the fact that the enormous balloons are an interpretation rather than standard household implements account for the lack of enthusiasm? This delicate matter must be left to the judgment of qualified Koonsologists.

Later in Christie’s sale another Koons, “Hulk Elvis III,” painted in 2007, brought $2.43 million, slightly more than the low estimate. This picture does not relate in any way to the vacuum cleaners, nor to the balloons. And if the last two have anything in common, it is only a negative characteristic: neither was made by the artist using his hands.

The lack of stylistic unity in Jeff Koons’s work makes it difficult to explain in clear language the considerations that led the experts to submit their estimates or indeed the bidders to sign their checks.

That difficulty extends to much of contemporary art. The day has yet to arrive when someone comes up with a clear definition of just what contemporary art is. Even chronology fails to provide a guideline. Works by long dead artists are sold under the “contemporary art” banner. At Sotheby’s in November, 36 of 55 lots were credited to defunct artists, and at Christie’s 52 out of 76. Arshile Gorky died in 1948, Mark Rothko in 1970, Andy Warhol in 1987, Roy Lichtenstein and Willem de Kooning in 1997, to mention but a few among the most famous and expensive.

The nature of the artistic act does not help, either. It can range from painting or sculpturing to commissioning manufactured items like the sets of boxlike aluminum and plexiglass units to which Donald Judd gave no title. At Sotheby’s one of these sold for $942,500, about 5,000 times the cost of manufacturing. Other artists resort to the simpler trick of buying goods from hardware stores, like Dan Flavin with his fluorescent tubes.

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Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds sold for over $550,000 at Sotheby’s in London.Credit
Sotheby’s

Even within groups that lend themselves to some broad categorization — abstract compositions, figural paintings — the absence of shared aesthetics is glaring. Rothko’s “Untitled” superposed blocks of color, sold at Sotheby’s Nov. 9 session for $22.48 million, just under the low estimate, shares no common ground with Gorky’s “Housatonic,” a large drawing of seething, swinging shapes in ink and colored crayons that went minutes later for $3.66 million, almost triple the high estimate.

In figural art, differences are extreme. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Riddle Me This, Batman,” which was painted in 1987 in his naughty schoolboy’s cartoon manner and brought $6.24 million at Sotheby’s, does not belong in the same world as the record $42.64 million Lichtenstein seen at Christie’s. Nor does the latter relate in any fashion to Francis Bacon’s “Figure in Movement,” which cost $14.1 million at Sotheby’s.

But while the works dubbed contemporary are as disparate in visual terms as they vary in their material execution, they can be said to reflect the same cultural reality: one way or another, they proceed from a violent reaction against the century-old tradition of Western art as it developed until World War I. Whether spoofy figuration from Pop Art to Basquiat, minimalist abstraction from Rothko to Agnes Martin, or the art of the inept à la Jeff Koons and the manufactured units à la Donald Judd, all represent a form of rejectionism that goes back to the pronouncements of Marcel Duchamp, who promoted the art of the absurd in the early 20th century. The French intellectual, contemptuous of the establishment, wanted to bury the ancient culture of Europe. He is the godfather of the artistic nihilism that much of the contemporary art promoted on the auction scene represents.

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If there is one thing that cannot be guaranteed to be financially rock solid, this is an art based on negation. The most exposed aspects of contemporary rejectionism are the most rudimentary. The shelf life of Jeff Koons’s jocular objects, Donald Judd’s manufactured elements or Jean-Michel Basquiat’s cartoons is unlikely to be the longest. The day one of the pundits discovers that the king has no clothes on, all the glib talk of marketing teams telling investors how savvy they are will not prevent tens of millions of dollars from melting like butter in the sun.

For the moment, contemporary art is on a roll. The London evening sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s on Feb. 15 and 16 were thin but hugely successful. At the Sotheby’s sale, which took in £44.36 million, or $71.05 million, works by artists from a younger generation, which opened the proceedings, were enthusiastically chased regardless of style, meaning or medium. Ai Weiwei’s heap of porcelain pebbles dubbed “Sunflower Seeds” brought £359,350, two and a half times the high estimate, and Takashi Murakami’s “Skulls Rock,” a painting in a manner inspired by children’s comics, also exceeded all hopes at £493,250.

Long-established artists commanded gigantic prices. A remarkable “Abstract Picture” by Gerhard Richter, which doubled the high estimate at £7.2 million, ended up in the hands of a Chinese couple. They outbid an agent acting for the New York dealer Larry Gagosian. For the first time on the international scene, China beat America in what had been almost an exclusive Western preserve until a decade ago.

At Christie’s a day later, the slightly larger £61.38 million sale repeated Sotheby’s performance on an even more enthusiastic note. A world record price was paid for a 1962 portrait by Martial Raysse in a simplified poster-like style. At £4.07 million, it also became the most expensive work by a living French artist.

The competition triggered by a 1967 self-portrait by Andy Warhol sent it flying to £10.79 million, almost double the high estimate.

Pictures painted decades ago by artists who are no longer alive still fetch the highest prices by far. Consecrated by the passage of time, their work inspires greater financial confidence. Even multimillionaires seek some form of reassurance when it comes to contemporary art.